Are you taking the proper measures to ensure your bar is looking after its liquor inventory?
Your product stock is your company’s investment into its profitability. The more you look after your inventory and train your employees to do so, the higher your profit margins and profitability will be.
That’s why bar inventory management is paramount to the profitability and success of your business. To improve those processes, it’s important to implement best practices that will help your bartenders optimize business operations and reduce inventory waste.
In this blog, we take a look at some of the key processes to implement to improve bartender performance and enhance your company’s control over its bar inventory management processes.
- Take consistent inventory counts and use bar inventory management software
First and foremost, any successful bar must be taking consistent and accurate liquor inventory counts. A bar inventory management system will help your business take consistent and accurate inventory counts that improve your visibility and control over your stock - and it’s significantly more effective than using manual spreadsheets.
Find out how to take accurate bar inventory counts on our blog, How to Count Liquor Inventory in Your Bar: The Complete Guide.
Accurate inventory counts give your bar the insights it needs to minimize waste, improve ordering processes, optimize your menus and better serve your customers.
- Measure your variance (also known as liquor shrinkage)
Variance, also known as liquor shrinkage, is any liquor inventory you have that goes missing. Knowing where you are losing inventory is an important insight that helps your organization to minimize loss.
Liquor shrinkage is calculated by the total good sold - usage. By doing this after your inventory counts, you can determine exactly which products you are experiencing inventory loss on.
Reducing liquor shrinkage starts with accurate inventory data, and ends with educating staff on where loss is occurring and how they can make changes to their processes to prevent loss moving forward.
- Prevent overpouring
Overpouring is one of the most common reasons for liquor shrinkage. When your bartenders overpour, your business is losing profits.
While overpouring can occur as a result of serving friends, it’s typically unintentional and a side effect of ineffective measuring techniques such as free pouring or eye-balling liquor pouts.
To prevent overpouring, make sure your bartenders have the appropriate tools to measure how much liquor they pour into each beverage and take the time to train your employees on how to make specific drinks and use those tools correctly.
- Educate your team
Taking the time to train your staff will have a wide range of benefits. Ensuring bartenders can seamlessly make drinks from your menu will minimize spillages and staff stress, and will save time spent on each drink served. This will leave the customer with an enhanced experience and will result in more tips for your staff.
Additionally, using the information and data you’ve collated from your bar inventory management counts you and educates your team on which products are experiencing product loss and how they can mitigate some of those losses.
- Make your sure bar is organized
Spillages, breakage and lost inventory will have an immediate hit to the bottom line of your bar. When your bar is unorganized, all of these mistakes are far more likely to occur than if your bar is well organized.
By creating a strategy for how employees should organize both your bar and your product shelves, you’ll be able to mitigate product loss and improve the efficiency and happiness of your bartenders.
Looking for more information on how you can reduce waste at your bar and improve profitability? Get in touch with Sculpture Hospitality today. Our team of experts would love to help your business enhance its bar inventory management process.
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